On Monday April 6th, I decided to go with some friends offshore fishing out of Rudee Inlet in Virginia Beach aboard the "Ate Up". The goal was to head south during the night to get to a place just south of the cigar where satellite shot showed gulf stream water temperature at 70 degrees on one side and cold 59 degree water to its north.
We started in warm green water in the morning and marked plenty of tunas under us. We even had a few fish swirl on our baits but didn’t eat. Another Virginia Beach boat in the area hooked up on a giant bluefin tuna and fought it beside us for several hours but we could not get a fish to eat our ballyhoos. After a while the tuna marks on our fish finder went away and we lost hope that we would get a bite, so we moved south a couple miles towards the "point" area off Oregon Inlet. Arriving down there as soon as we set lines, we had a yellowfin tuna bite, which we put in the box for our first fish of the day.
We trolled the area at the point and the water looked good with lots of porpoises and bait marks and after about an hour we hooked one out of a double yellowfin tuna bites, and put one more yellowfin in the fish box. After we caught the second yellowfin, we heard some reports of a bite or two to the north in the area we had left earlier and decided to ride the gulf stream to the north about 15 miles to get with the fleet. The current was ripping and it would only take an hour and a half to get to the fleet but about 5 miles south of them, at the 750 line, we began marking tunas and seeing slicks indicating that we had tuna feeding under us.
We trolled in circles over the slicks for a while and no bites. After a half hour or 40 minutes of working the marks, we turned the boat north to get back with the fleet to end the day. Just as we turned away from our marks, a longrigger blue/white iislander with horse ballyhoo on an 80 wide goes down with a bite. Chase Robinson goes downstairs and takes the rod and settles in for the fight. This fish was really strong and would run off three or four hundred yards of line then get under the boat, wouldn’t let us pull him up, then the fish would get its energy back and run off again. It did this for hours and it was a stalemate. I was having to drive the boat very aggressively in reverse to keep up with the fish. It went wherever it wanted.
Our bite was at 3:00pm and the fight continued where the fish would run off then sit under the boat until after dark. Finally at 8:45 the fish gave up. 5 and a half hours of pulling almost 50 pounds of drag and the fish simply couldn’t take it. I was tired just driving the boat. We get a gaff into the fish at about 8:45 and the fish is still acting crazy. The crew downstairs straightened out every gaff on the boat trying to get a tail rope onto the fish. Without the hard work of everyone on the boat, this fish would have been lost at the gaff. Everyone did the right thing at the right time. While putting a tail rope on the giant tuna, the fish freaks out again, tearing the tuna door off the back of the boat. I went downstairs to help so we could get a line in the fishes mouth and get the fish aboard the boat and the tuna starts thrashing and bites my hand. Even after more than five hours of fighting this fish had enough energy to go crazy. It was just a mean, evil fish. After an hour of the entire crew struggling to get the fish in the boat, we get her on deck and see that the fish is huge and around 100 inches long. Everyone is absolutely exhausted and during the course of the fight the fish had towed us 15 miles northeast of where we had our initial bite. At 10 pm, we were in almost 1000 fathoms at the 910 line, 90 plus miles from rudee inlet. Exhausted, we all took turns driving through the night and got into rudee inlet at 2am that morning.
I went to my house and took a shower and a nap waiting for the Virginia Beach fishing center to open later that morning and we agreed to meet at the boat at 9am. I showed up at 9am, drove the boat to the fishing center where Pat Foster had a boom truck ready to lift our fish off the boat and weigh it. As he lifted the fish off the boat the scale read 606 pounds, big enough for a new Virginia State record bluefin tuna. We all gave each other high fives, filled out the proper paperwork, and waited for a state representative to come certify the catch. Our 102.5 inch long, 70 inch girth 606 pound bluefin tuna is the pending Virginia State Record Bluefin Tuna!
